DITO OF WITCH RIDING BROOM SKIN

So people used their developing pharmacological knowledge to produce drug-laden balms-or, yep, ' witch's brews.' And t o distribute those salves with maximum effectiveness, these crafty hallucinators borrowed a technology from the home: a broom. And the most receptive areas of the body for that absorption were the sweat glands of the armpits.

DITO OF WITCH RIDING BROOM SKIN

What people realized, though, was that absorbing them through the skin could lead to hallucinations that arrived without the unsavory side effects. When consumed, those old-school hallucinogens could cause assorted unpleasantnesses-including nausea, vomiting, and skin irritation. So why do the brooms fit into this? Because to achieve their hallucinations, these early drug users needed a distribution method that was a little more complicated than simple ingestion. Writing in the 16th century, the Spanish court physician Andrés de Laguna claimed to have taken 'a pot full of a certain green ointment … composed of herbs such as hemlock, nightshade, henbane, and mandrake' from the home of a couple accused of witchcraft. Forbes's David Kroll notes that there are also hallucinogenic chemicals in Atropa belladonna (deadly nightshade), Hyoscyamus niger (henbane), Mandragora officinarum (mandrake), and Datura stramonium (jimsonweed). And they experimented with other plants, as well. So people, as people are wont to do, adapted this knowledge, figuring out ways to tame ergot, essentially, for hallucinatory purposes.

A 17th-century wood engraving of a 'witch' being prepared for 'flight' (Wellcome Institute, London, via John Mann)

Dito of witch riding broom